Gloating Boris Johnson is rubbing our noses in his victory with yet more half truths and false promises

If, when you woke this morning, you heard the news and felt like pulling the bedclothes over your head and hoping the world would go away, you’d be forgiven. Unless you are a member of the personality cult that is today’s Conservative Party, politics is going to be quite unbearable for the next few years – both in substance and in style.

As Johnson’s acceptance speech in Hillingdon Town Hall demonstrates, the half truths and twisted facts that characterised his election campaign will continue to tumble from his lips and those of his government and his party. He will be happy to give you the impression that they will be building "40 new hospitals", as he said, when they aren’t really, or at least with no timescale of funding attached to the promise. Or that he'll recruit "50,000 new nurses", even though that figure always included a number already working in the NHS.

He says he will “get Brexit done”, as usual, when in fact Brexit won’t be done until the UK signs and ratifies its trade and security treaty with the EU, which will take years (if it happens at all). He said that this was an election he didn’t want to call when in reality it was everything he wanted – wiping out the opposition in his own party and beyond.

Just to rub every ones noses in it some more, to celebrate their victory Conservative HQ repeated the dirty trick of passing off their Twitter account as a bona fide fact checking operation.

The Conservatives and Johnson are gloating. It is as if the juvenile techniques he once deployed at the Oxford Union are the only kind of politics he understands.

Make no mistake, this will be a vengeful government that will take spin to new levels. Not that it needs to, with Labour and the Lib Dems both leaderless and crushed. The SNP have their own agenda for independence, which will further divide a fractured embittered nation. Apart from the spirited resistance from Holyrood, Britain will have something of the feel of a one-party state. From this distance, it seems difficult to envisage a reformed Labour Party winning power within the next five years.

As I have written before, this era feels like the 1980s, for all the social changes since then. In those days too parts of the working class – skilled workers especially – turned to the Tories. The opposition parties were divided, as now, and a split vote (crudely speaking) allowed the Tories to take unlikely targets in the north and Midlands – though the scale now is far, far greater.

Then, as now, the Labour Party was divided and unwilling to reconcile itself to the voters’ scepticism about its leadership and its radical programme. Meantime, the Tories just strengthened their grip on power and got in with the job of dismantling the state. They also set about weakening the checks and balances to unfettered executive power – the BBC, Parliament, the courts, the civil service, local government.

This time, the infamous page 48 of the Conservative manifesto sets out the planned power grab in some detail, but doesn’t disclose the extent of the ambition to dominate. This is a vindictive bunch led by a man who is not as nice as his public image suggests. The welfare state and local councils should expect no mercy.

More than anything, the Tories will carry on using and abusing the political system. There will be no regulation of social media; no attempt to clean up politics and make it a little less fraudulent; and the franchise will be suppressed at home through voter ID and artificially expanded abroad to all expats, and constituency boundaries changed again – all giving the Conservatives an additional advantage.

The deceptions and the scams and the dirty tricks – on all sides to be fair – will escalate as each party tries to pre empt and outsmart the others with bogus social media and false flag activity.

There will be an arms race of lies. It will indeed be unbearable.